“AI, make the website good”

Millions of Large-Language-Model-generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development. We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves). I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize self-congratulatory tooling improvements for what they are: automated simplicity (aka can-kicking complexity) from software companies claiming to be at the bleeding edge of technique and application. I’m always left wondering (suspecting the answer with hopeful optimism that my hunch is wrong this time): do these workflow improvements actually improve how people (technical or otherwise) experience software? Certainly we have more software. But is it better? Front-end web developers have lived through about fifteen years of the single-page-application-era…

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